This morning I listened to
Stereotomy, and I noticed the line "Too many windmills in my way" in "In the Real World." I'm pretty sure this is a reference to
Don Quixote. It's been a few years since I read
Don Quixote (and even then, it was just excerpts in a literature class), but the episode with the windmill is pretty widely known anyway (
there's a whole Wikipedia page about it). At the beginning of the story, Don Quixote reads too many old stories about knights. He starts to think that he himself is a knight and goes on various imagined adventures. During one of these adventures, he attacks a windmill, thinking it's a giant.
In "In the Real World," there's the recurring line "Don't wanna live my life in the real world," which sort of describes the same situation Don Quixote is in: living in an imagined version of the real world, rather than the real world itself. Although, if I remember aright, Don Quixote isn't aware that what he's imagining isn't real.
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In referencing the lyrics in the liner notes of the CD, I discovered that while the title is "In the Real World" on the back of the case and on the CD itself, in the liner notes, it appears as just "The Real World":
